Carol Wilder, Oral History

Recorded: May 3, 2010
Interviewed by Stephanie Tulley
Transcribed by Amanda Faehnel

[Interviewer]: Good afternoon. The date is Monday, May 3, 2010. My name is Stephanie Tulley. We're conducting an interview today for the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project. Could you please state your name?

[Carol Wilder]: Carol Wilder.

[Interviewer]: Carol, where were you born?

[Carol Wilder]: Cleveland.

[Interviewer]: Cleveland, Ohio?

[Carol Wilder]: Cleveland, Ohio, yeah.

[Interviewer]: Okay. When did you begin school at Kent State?

[Carol Wilder]: I began at Kent State in the summer of 1969 as a Ph.D. student in rhetoric and communication.

[Interviewer]: And your initial interest, wasn't that in classical--

[Carol Wilder]: I started out, it was an interest in classical rhetoric. I was taking a Plato and Aristotle seminar and added Greek. So that's how serious I was about classical rhetoric. Greek was like the hardest thing ever in the first two quarters that I was in the program.

So during that year--I talked about my colleague, Jim Cracker, who was also a graduate student, he'd be interesting to talk to--who was very active during that year. I sort of moved from being a suburban housewife to being kind of curious to actually eventually moving down here, I mean, is what happened--getting divorced, I mean the whole nine yards. My husband was one of those who said they should have shot more of them, so I'm like, "Goodbye." I mean, it wasn't that simple, but in some sense it was that simple but the change--my change, my political--I completely turned around and I was like, what didn't I know about Vietnam and why didn't I know it? And that's how I got interested in media and how do we construct our mediated worlds and what kind of bubble had I been in? And how do you selectively tend to different kinds of messages? So that got me interested in media studies and political media and I taught that and [have] written about that for forty years now.

[Interviewer]: So, when you were on campus, you were a graduate student. What was the general atmosphere that you could say you felt when you were around here?

[Carol Wilder]: I think there was a lot of unrest, if you will, and there were demonstrations, but since I was a commuter student, I was not here more than I really had to be for the most part. And I would say the great majority of students were not involved at all. Even though by this time I was very much opposed to the war in Vietnam, I hadn't crossed the line and gone out and done anything about it. So it was kind of a mixture of the sort of how college--business as usual, Kent State kind of normative--compared to New York, at least, where I live now--very sort of calm and it was sort of a combination of that, but there was this rumbling and there were things happening all over the country, really. Demonstrations of Berkeley and Wisconsin and Columbia. The American public, public opinion about Vietnam had changed in 1968. It practically turned on a dime after the Tet Offensive and Walter Cronkite saying, "Well, we're in a bloody stalemate." I mean, literally public opinion in the U.S. flipped at that point because it was clear that what the American public was being told was not true. Veterans were coming back reporting what was really going on. The My Lai Massacre was in 1968. 1968, around there, was the heaviest fighting, the heaviest casualties. And so 1970 was even two years later and we still weren't out of there. So then when Nixon, rather than trying to pull us out in any way, starts bombing Cambodia. That was the precipitating event for the weekend in May.

[Interviewer]: So what are your memories of those days in May? You can start from May first--

[Carol Wilder]: May first I came with my girlfriend Katie to see--I drove down here from Cleveland, drove down to see a play called The Serpent that a student of mine had directed. And when we were leaving about ten o'clock at night, or whatever it was, people were just starting to really mill around Water Street. And you don't remember, because you probably don't remember life without the internet, practically--there was no communication really. It was so different from today. And so you could go home, like a lot of students went home for the weekend, didn't know anything, came back on Monday and got shot, is sort of what happened in a couple of cases.

So it wasn't as if--I can't even remember if I heard that the ROTC building was burning or--I can't remember knowing anything until Monday when my girlfriend called me and said, "What are those crazy people at your school doing?" And the first message was out, I'm sure you've heard all this, that the [National] Guardsmen were killed.

[Interviewer]: Right.

[Carol Wilder]: And then also what I read today from The Chicago Tribune that a sniper there was shot from the rooftop. It was very hard to get information out of campus. Maybe, I don't know, if you've talked to Mike Lunine, Myron Lunine, he was the dean here at the time?

[Interviewer]: No, I haven't.

[Carol Wilder]: Or anybody has, but you know, he tells the story about how they had to go through Senator Ted Kennedy's office to actually get the news out that students had been shot. So, it was not like today when everybody's got their cellphones. It wouldn't have happened today. It wouldn't have happened today. It wouldn't have happened a year later by putting out today when everybody had cameras, you know?

And then campus was shut. So, of course, we're all calling each other and some classes met off campus. I was teaching two classes too and so there was no internet and I remember writing--I had this, I don't know what happened to this mimeograph, you know, the purple stuff?--writing this heartfelt letter and meeting with my graduate classes. And then the School of Speech, which it was then called, had a big meeting and all the faculty were, Oh, how could we have, you know, done those things? Everybody was pretty much in shock and you know, everything was going to change, and why didn't we see this coming and what could we have done and what can we do? And there was this sort of wailing of--but that didn't last. Nothing really changed, as far as I could tell, in the fall.

[Interviewer]: Really?

[Carol Wilder]: Well, I think there was apprehensiveness on campus but I don't recall people kind of changing--it wasn't that people on campus [were] against each other to begin with. So it wasn't like the enemy was within, especially. Everybody was pretty much on the same page at that time.

[Interviewer]: So you said that you were teaching a class at the time? When you contacted your students, what were they saying to you about--

[Carol Wilder]: I don't remember. I don't remember.

[Interviewer]: No, that's okay.

[Carol Wilder]: I don't have any of that.

[Interviewer]: What did you do that summer then?

[Carol Wilder]: Well, I probably just stayed home with my baby. Well, she wasn't a baby. By this time she was two. So I probably was chasing around my two year old.

[Interviewer]: Did you ever have any fear that Kent State wouldn't open back up or any of that or was there always just this feeling that they had to come back?

[Carol Wilder]: No, I guess I thought it would come back. It was unprecedented in anybody's experience, so it was hard to know how to--to me, it was shocking at the time. What I remember about after the shootings, every place shut down. All the schools shut down. Millions of college students were shut--and then there were all these little Kent State Universities in exile. Case Western Reserve University and Oberlin College. Someone was talking about another one last night somewhere else. Also Ray Heisey said he still has and Tom Grace have their Kent Police State University t-shirts. Have you seen those?

[Interviewer]: I haven't seen those.

[Carol Wilder]: Yeah, those are really cool. I don't have mine but it was white and Tom of course knew the whole story. You have to talk to Tom if you haven't talked to Tom. He knew the whole story of how those t-shirts came to be and how they were being sold at these various--you know, Kent State University in exile--they were white t-shirts. I remember they were three dollars. They were white t-shirts with red just block printing: Kent Police State University. So there was a lot of that coming together after and I remember going to big speakers, William Kunstler speaking at Case Western Reserve to like a thousand people and needless to say, it got a lot of people very fired up.

[Interviewer]: So let's talk about your academic life. You began your studies in classical rhetoric, which you talked about, and then completed your dissertation on political rhetoric and it was entitled, "The Rhetoric of Social Movements in Critical Perspective." How did the events on May 4 shape your scholarly life?

[Carol Wilder]: Well, it's not just May fourth. It was actually the women's movement at the time, as well, contributed to it because during the course of that first year, '69 to '70, I took a seminar from Ray Heisey on the rhetoric of social movement and the new thing, women's lib, it really was a new thing. Having had to give up my job because my husband worked at the same place, you know, I mean, I got interested in it. It was very intriguing at the time. Feminism wasn't even a word that I can recall. And so I got interested in the women's movement and really got interested in the women's movement and ended up writing a feature series for the Sun Papers that were like weekly papers that were out of Cleveland that got the national award for feature writing. It was my brief career as a journalist. But the whole idea that women were somehow--of course it just blew my mind. So that was kind of happening at the same time that the other stuff was happening. I mean, there were a lot of movements going on at the same time.

So I ended up doing, I wanted to do my dissertation on the women's movement, but when you do a dissertation, they say like, Well, what's your methodology and what's your theory? You know, so I ended up backing up, sort of marks of Hegel and Aristotle, I don't know. So I think it was like eighty percent theory now and the women's movement was a case study. But I've used that social movement model, I used my own model over the years. It's very, like the naming, framing, blaming, a pretty good simplifier. Structure, substance, strategy, and style which was sort of the model I came up with in the sort of movement model. Very succinct way to frame a lot of information and then you can take it from there. So, I would say the women's movement was equally influential in my thinking.

But that came and went. Because after, I got really sick of that after three or four years. It was, like, old and the movement changed and it just--I taught women's studies at Oberlin and I taught women's studies for a couple of years. I just kind of burned out on it. If you wanted to have a family and be married and stuff it wasn't really the place you wanted your head to be. In fact, it turned out to be that's when a lot of gay women started coming out in the movement and so it became almost more of a gay movement in a sense because they didn't have to answer so much to the men and then so the straight women, it sort of split in that way in the early '70s, but in any case, I was pretty burned out on it, especially when my husband and my best friend ran off. (laughs)

[Interviewer]: Oh my gosh.

[Carol Wilder]: Well, it kind of happened, he didn't run off, but you know, that kind of stuff to people being--people are people. It was very disillusioning to me to realize that people are actually just human.

[Interviewer]:Right.

[Carol Wilder]: People, beings. And the best political principles, that's where I think my political approach is very much personal politics, that, you could be a Republican, maybe not a Nazi, but you know, you could be a conservative, or you have different political beliefs than I do, that's fine with me. It's how people act towards each other. Because I've known plenty of very lefty sorts of politicos who are really just jerks in real life. And that's where the women's movement came out of that a lot when women were found saying, Hey, what are we doing with the mimeograph machines here for? You know? Aren't we? Yeah, that sort of stuff.

So, I think it's important for people's personal politics, the way they act towards other human beings, and their politics politics to be consistent. That's sort of what the Vietnam project is about at one level. It's sort of putting my money where my mouth is, and trying to--because I have the opportunity, because of the history of my relationships--trying to provide a chance, an opportunity for students who wouldn't ordinarily have it, to learn media practices. There's no first amendment there but if you give them a camera and some--you know? They will express themselves and I think it's sort of a way of empowering anybody, but certainly students in a country where free speech is discouraged, if not forbidden.

[Interviewer]: Going back to the Vietnam project that you're working on, can you briefly explain what the project is and how you got involved--

[Carol Wilder]: Yeah. I got involved because I wanted to cook up something for a project for a Fulbright for a sabbatical. I've been a chair and associate dean--chair for fifteen years and associate dean for twelve--and I was completely burned out and they didn't want to let me not do it because it's hard to find people to do those jobs. (laughs) I had to have a sabbatical and so I cooked up this project and I thought, Oh, Mr. (unintelligible)! You know, Mr. (unintelligible), the first friend I talked about, well, his friend, the other guy at the table, who I met on another trip to Vietnam, it was for the president of Hanoi University then, and I thought, I wonder if they do visiting? Just out of the blue, I hadn't even contacted him for six months or more, a couple years maybe. And so I wrote to him and he wrote back and he's, "Oh, we'd be honored to have you here." And so I thought, Oh, okay, bingo! I don't care if I have to swim over. I'm going to go do something there and that was sort of the start of it.

And then somehow Fulbright came to my attention. I don't know how I thought about doing that because I didn't really know anybody who had done a Fulbright Scholar thing and I thought they were impossible to get. Well, not really. I mean, I found out more on the selection committees now. They're not impossible to get, but if the fit's right, the fit's right. For me, the fit was right. I'd had one experience in Vietnam, so there was plenty. It wasn't just like, Hey, it's cool! I want to go to Vietnam, it's a cool country. You know, it doesn't work. But if you have some kind of--what am I going to do when I'm there? Well, I'm going to introduce media studies into this particular university and try to--then it gets very ambitious and think I'm going to make a lab. I was really crazy, but I did it. I mean, I'm not a production person. I've done a few short things but I wouldn't hire myself to teach production, but I ended up doing that because that's what they wanted.

But, you know, people pitched in and one thing led to another, so I made my Fulbright proposal, got that approved, and then I got equipment together and then I got there and everything was different from what I thought. I thought I knew the place pretty well and I was completely blindsided by all the things that I didn't even know that I was going to run into. So it's not the problems--I thought I was prepared for anything I could think of and I'd really gone through also the curriculum and tried to choose things that I thought would work. You know, forget about it! (laughs)

I told the dean this morning at breakfast--he was talking about teaching theory in Asia. The only way I can think of that might work that does seem to work is do it historically. If you talk about a history of communication technology, for instance. You could bring concepts into that along the way, but if you just start here, they don't think from theory. They're thinking in fables and metaphors and it's a whole different kind of way of thinking. I mentioned today about the war film, how the idea of criticizing a film was not an idea. You watched a movie. What do you mean? The idea of critical analysis that we take for granted because that's sort of what our education is based on, is completely lacking. I forget what the question was.

[Interviewer]: Well, I was just asking you how you got involved in the project.

[Carol Wilder]: Oh. So, yeah. So I got the Fulbright, I got the sabbatical, I got the Fulbright, got the equipment, and I got there and I was like, Oh my god, what have I done? I can't believe I have ten months of this ahead of me. It was really hard. Even though I had a very nice apartment. My dad died the second month I was there and I knew he might, so that was hard. It was really hard. The experience, culture shock at a level I didn't expect. I'd been to Vietnam five times, but really trying to get beneath the superficial level of the culture to get something done, it's very different. And I don't know the language very well. Oh, that's even a lie. I don't know the language at all. (laughs) I don't know the language. (laughs) I studied it many times. I can pronounce it. You hear my pronunciation's pretty good.

[Interviewer]: It is good.

[Carol Wilder]: But I don't know what anything means.

[Interviewer]: (laughs) You said earlier that you felt like you were putting your money where your mouth was with it. Why is Vietnam the area of your interest? Is it because of the Vietnam War?

[Carol Wilder]: Well, you know, because if we get that right then we can get a lot of other things right. It's because it was part of my generation. It was what was there for me to learn about. It was how I learned about political media. I learned a lot about this country and foreign policy, and all the rest. So I think if we can have a (unintelligible) with Vietnam, that's important. And I also think, personally, we owe those people. I mean, we trashed that country, trashed that country. More kinds of bombs dropped on that country than all the other wars put together up to that point. Hundreds of thousands of bombing runs in the north. I didn't even think that was a true number but hundreds of thousands of bombing runs. The bridge was bombed hundreds of times, just itself. We poisoned the country, you know, with Agent Orange; we poisoned ourselves with so many of our veterans and their children. So, I think we owe them, at least that's how I feel, and if there's a little that I can do, then that's what I can do.

[Interviewer]: Would you say that what you saw on campus that day, do you think it had an effect on your personal and your academic life?

[Carol Wilder]: Well, I didn't see anything--I wasn't on campus that day, but what I experienced--

[Interviewer]: Yeah.

[Carol Wilder]: --in relation to May fourth? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. It certainly contributed to my divorce because we came down on very different sides. My politics, on my Facebook page, it says entropic. That's sort of what they are. (laughs) It's not down the line. It's not down the line left or anything. Most are more libertarian kind of one of these, and I think it's complicated. I think the landscape is a lot more complicated than right and left.

So yeah, sure, it made me into a radical in a sense and so I went to San Francisco State which was a very simpatico environment, which had had a big strike of its own in 1968 and they were still talking about when I got there in 1975. (laughs) It was very similar to Kent in the sense that it was highly politicized--it was more politicized because the faculty was politicized, because they'd been on strike and when I interviewed there in 1975, this woman on the committee took me into a broom closet and said, "You know, you've got to know who's in and who's out during the strike to sort of coach you." And I said, "A strike? What year is it?" You know? It didn't matter. That lasted all the way through when all those people retired, died, and stuff like that.

So I found myself in an environment that was also very egalitarian and sort of leftist politics in San Francisco. And I moved to the New School, which is very progressive ideologically but very conservative as an organization, so it was hard to adjust to. It's very nineteenth century.

[Interviewer]: So what do you think the consequences of this event were for your generation?

[Carol Wilder]: I don't know. The consequences? Well, it got everybody's attention for a while, and I think it was the end of the '60s. See, I think the '60s go from 1963 to 1970--from when Kennedy was shot to Kent State. That was the end of the '60s. That was the '60s, those seven years, as we hear about the '60s.

The '70s were really pretty wild. When you think back on that decade, and so through that whole kind of--until the economy went bad with Jimmy Carter and then Reagan came in and we're still--and then there were wars with Nicaragua and it's the whole kind of mess and the culture takes a big giant step backwards with Reagan, with that philosophy. I thought at the time, and I think a lot of people thought, Well, we're just getting more and more enlightened and progressive and the environment--you know, Earth Day was the same year as May fourth on May 1, 1970 was the first Earth Day. The women's movement, you know? So, we're already kind of gotten going.

But there was this whole pushing forward of--and look at today. I mean, it's whack. It's crazy. The Tea Party would have been unthinkable. So I just guess I assumed that people would get more and more enlightened and liberal or whatever and it was a pendulum thing. 1980, things started moving the other way.

So what did my generation learn in the long run? I don't know. I wish I knew. I wish I thought they learned anything. I wish I agreed with Tom [Grace] that it's got a lot of attention, because I don't think it's had anything near--part of the problem with Kent State with May four I think is the same problem as Vietnam: people treat them like they were like anomalies in the culture. It was just a bad day. I mean, a weird thing happened and it was different from everything else. Well, the fact of the matter, my view, is that Vietnam and May fourth are the quintessential examples of American culture. It's like when the screen is pulled back and you see the Wizard of Oz, except he's in a tank. You see the brutality, the militaristic-ness of this culture, which is in a certain sense a police state. More than half of the money goes to weapons and arms and just because you don't see them, that's because we know how to behave. But you just try to, as my friend Brian, I quoted Brian Wilson today, saying, "You're free to dissent in this country as long as you're not effective at it." That's when the train doesn't stop.

So I think that May fourth and Vietnam are the central examples, quintessential--I don't want to keep using that word-- of when you see the ugliness of American foreign policy, the brutality, and you see it today in all kinds of ways, but that curtain only opens a little bit and then it's closed again. I think that happened in both cases. Oh, Vietnam. Oh, Kent. May fourth. That was just something crazy that happened out there in Ohio. People don't take it as a metaphor and say, What does this say about the whole culture? Let's say that wasn't an anomaly. Let's say that was just a moment that the culture got caught expressing its basic militarism. It's tragic when you think of the guardsmen, some who were even students. Pitting young people against each other like that, which is what it was. Kind of the whole thing set up by this imperialistic foreign policy that is trying to control a country that doesn't understand in the least ten thousand miles away because it thinks of Vietnam as those Communists, the domino theory will go into effect and every Cambodia and everything. Now what happened? Vietnam is Communist but no place else is except over there, but it didn't happen. So that's my political rant.

[Interviewer]: So are there any other thoughts that you'd like to share?

[Carol Wilder]: No. I'm pleased to be back and it's a very moving experience. You know, I don't want to make too much of it because I feel that I'm sort of a gawker, in a way, although I know I'm not. I mean, I know where I was and how it affected me and how it's affected my life, and it's apparent, I think. It's not like I'm sort of stalking celebrity casualties. (laughs) What a thought that is! Dean Kahler in the elevator! (laughs) That's what was so amazing when I heard from Tom [Grace] and it flipped me into the inner ring. Partly because he ran across something I wrote about Kent that wasn't even published, and it meant a lot to me that Tom had read it and wrote me how much he liked it. That he thought that I had gotten it, whatever it was. That meant a lot to me.

And I want to continue doing what I'm doing with Vietnam or other projects but like the talking books in Fahrenheit 451, in my book--my forever book, this is taking a while--but Kent is a big part of it. There are half a dozen narratives that kind of weave through it and the Kent story is part of it. So hopefully I'll make a contribution in that way.

[Interviewer]: Excellent. Well thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview.

[Carol Wilder]: Okay. Thank you.

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